Entreprise Panel: Cloud Apps for the SMB
Sponsored By:
Ravi Vijayaraghavan - Moderator
Partner, Bain & Company
Ravi Vijayaraghavan is a Partner in the North American practice of Bain & Company, based in Boston. Prior to relocating to Boston in January 2007, Ravi was a Partner in the Asian practice of Bain and was the head of Bain’s Asian technology practice based out of Singapore.
Ravi has been with Bain for 12 years and has accumulated experience across a wide range of industry segments and geographies. Recent assignments include pan-Asian growth strategy assignment for a world-leading computer systems company, strategy and operations improvement for a major telecommunications equipment vendor, and a ‘full potential’ program for one of the regional largest telecom operators. During his career at Bain he has worked across the United States and Asia, leading teams in China, Australia, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.
Ravi has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated as class valedictorian. He also has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, and completed graduate work in EE at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. Prior to joining Bain he held marketing and product management positions at Oracle Corporation and at Centigram Communications, both in Silicon Valley.
Alex Chriss - Panelist
Director, Intuit Partner Platform, Intuit Inc.
Alex leads Intuit’s platform-as-a-service strategy, uniting the company’s own connected services with third party offerings in a single ecosystem. The Intuit Partner Platform allows independent developers to create and deploy products that work in conjunction with Intuit’s popular QuickBooks financial management software. He also heads the Intuit App Center, the destination for small businesses to access apps connected to Intuit’s cloud. Previously, Alex helped lead Intuit’s QuickBase product to become the leading online database.
Prior to Intuit, Alex held executive positions at Kronos Advanced Technology and Youthstream Media Networks and was founder and CEO of CollegeWeb.
Alex received his degree in Economics from Tufts University and is based in Waltham, Mass.
John Horton - Panelist
Staff Economist, oDesk Corporation
John Horton is a labor economist and the Staff Economist at oDesk Corporation where he is primarily responsible for designing features and policies that improve the quality and quantity of matches made in the online marketplace. Prior to joining oDesk, John received a PhD in Public Policy at Harvard for his thesis “Online Labor Markets,” chapters of which were published in Experimental Economics, Economic Letters, ACM-Electronic Commerce (2010), the HCOMP workshops (2010 & 2011), the Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (2010) and the ACM XRDS magazine.
John has been an invited speaker at CrowdConf 2010, the NIPS workshop on Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds, Crowdsourcing Meet-ups, Harvard Business School, Wharton Business School, University College London, the University of Chicago and the Academy of Management Annual Conference.
Prior to graduate school, John was an officer in the US Army and served as a tank platoon leader and company executive officer in Germany and Iraq. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2001 where he studied Mathematics and Computer Science.
Laura Marx - Panelist
Sr. Director of SMB Planning & Operations, Polycom
Laura Marx joined Polycom in 2010 as Sr. Director of SMB Planning & Operations. She is responsible for strategy of video conferencing in the small and medium business space. Prior to joining Polycom, Laura worked at Monster.com where she was responsible for creating strategic alliances between Monster and other media companies such as Comcast Cable and The New York Times. Laura was part of the core team which drove Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo! HotJobs. Laura graduated Boston University’s School of Management in 2006 with a focus in Entrepreneurship. She has a BA in Psychology and Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis. Laura currently lives in Boston with her husband, Andrew Klopfer.
Raju Vegesna - Panelist
Evangelist, Zoho
Raju is an evangelist for Zoho and is one of the foremost thought leaders in Enterprise 2.0, online collaboration, and CRM. Raju is one of the key people responsible for the strategic direction and product development of the Zoho Suite. Prior to joining Zoho Corp., Raju co-founded an Internet services company serving the educational market. He holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.
